Christmas Wishes for PPA

Happy Thanksgiving to all my friends in the United States!  So many fond memories are tied to this wonderful, family-based holiday.  While Thanksgiving a great time to reflect on everything we are thankful for, it’s also a wonderful time to start planning for Christmas.  🙂  After Thanksgiving dinner, my family and I would go Christmas tree shopping – we’d search rows and rows of trees for that perfect tree to adorn the corner of our living room.  I recreated my family’s trip to the Christmas Tree Farm for this week’s Pals Paper Arts challenge.  Here’s my card:

And here’s the banner for the challenge with Nicole Watt’s sketch that inspired my card – turn it sideways, and you’ve got a Christmas Tree Farm:

Tips, Tricks and Reminders

• Sign Post.  That’s right.  I turned this sketch on its side and played around with this gorgeous, retro sentiment from Cozy Christmas.  What Christmas Tree Farm doesn’t welcome you with the warmest of Christmas Wishes?  I used the Hardwood background stamp (inked with Crumb Cake and stamped on Crumb Cake) to create the pole that would obviously be there to greet us with this cheerful sign.
  

  Cozy Christmas stamp set, Stampin’ Up!

• Snipping Tiny Flowers.  I love to snip little things – it’s so relaxing for me.  These little flowers, however, are super tiny and even my paper snips didn’t enjoy cutting them out – I was left with big, white tips on each of the flowers.  That’s when I figured a quick way around the flower.  I started by cutting around the flower, snipped at the tips of each petal, into a circle.  Then, I simply snipped tiny “v”s in between each of the petals.  That was so much easier than starting with the “v”s – and I wasn’t left with long, thing strips of white.  Yippee!
• Color Combination.  I just love this combination of colors – the green and blue were informed by the Season of Cheer Designer Series Paper.  I pulled in the Crumb Cake base to coordinate with the sign post, and the flowers just created themselves red – how could they not be red?  If you like this color combination, too, feel free to save this:

Stamp Sets:  Cozy Christmas, Hardwood  Papers:  Season of Cheer Designer Series Paper, Crumb Cake, Mossy Meadow, Whisper White  Inks:  Crumb Cake, Mossy Meadow  Accessories:  Pearl Basic Jewels, Stampin’ Dimensionals

I hope you’ll pop over to the Pals Paper Arts to see the cards by the design team members and to play along with this week’s challenge.

Thanks for stopping by today!

Brian

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